Researchers from Google and The University of Washington are using Google computers to sift through million's of Flickr images of popular landmarks and locations. The project, called “time-lapse mining”, stitches these images together into beautiful sequences of time-lapse videos.

"We introduce an approach for synthesizing time-lapse videos of popular landmarks from large community photo collections. The approach is completely automated and leverages the vast quantity of photos available online.

First, we cluster 86 million photos into landmarks and popular viewpoints. Then, we sort the photos by date and warp each photo onto a common viewpoint.

Finally, we stabilize the appearance of the sequence to compensate for lighting effects and minimize flicker. Our resulting time-lapses show diverse changes in the world’s most popular sites, like glaciers shrinking, skyscrapers being constructed, and waterfalls changing course."

The team of researchers promised to release the code and results of their research soon.